I find myself laughing a lot at good films lately; at films which are reputed to be good and which I find to be so. Not all of these films are funny. In fact, most of them aren’t, at least not for much of their length.
But I laugh. Or maybe I don’t. Rather, I think that more often than not it’s just a smile I can’t stop. Which, on paper (or screen) might read ridiculously. Say it aloud and it probably sounds ridiculous too. Yet I don’t think there’s a better way I can say it. I suppose that it’s similar to how I feel when I’m falling for someone, but I really don’t want to digress.
Having said that, however, it seems that love is probably the most appropriate word for how I feel about film, about what film can achieve. It’s certainly how I feel about film when I see movies that don’t amaze me simply because of what I want to believe about them, but instead because of what they make me believe. Indeed, having somehow avoided watching Citizen Kane for the first 23 years of my life, I wasn’t sure what I expected from it, upon finally sitting down to watch a copy I was bought for my last birthday. Perhaps some part of me actually wanted to be disappointed by it, to achieve some special and peculiar sense of gratification from being one of the few people I’d heard talk about it who didn’t hold it in such high reverence. I don’t know quite why this should have been (to witness Orson Welles’ face upon his entrance in The Third Man is to know that what it projected wasn’t just acting – it was the face of a man in complete control of his every intention), and, sure enough, upon Kane’s ending, I had no clearer idea as to why I’d entertained thoughts of disapproval. There is no target at which that film aims that it even comes close to missing. It is as perfectly realised exploration of an idea as I’ve ever seen. Judging by such rampant hyperbole, stirred within me by this viewing, I was once again sure that film and the cinema was clearly the object of my deepest artistic affections.
And yet, that I had to be reminded of such a thing is indicative of the fact that I had taken some time off from fully indulging certain of my mind’s passions, that I had taken the very things that I had turned to so often, for help and entertainment, for granted, without giving anything back. In all those shadowy conversations with cinema screens and TV sets and computer monitors, I had been a silent partner. It might have seemed like I was just being a good listener, but the only way you can be sure of that is if the listener talks back to you about the things you’ve said. I didn’t. It is the same with books, and music, and paintings, and sculpture. Good or bad, they are designed not merely to entertain, but to engage the reader/listener/viewer. They are a part of the artist that they have chosen to shout out into the world, and if all that comes back is an echo, than it has furthered neither them nor the world any for them to do so.
One of the aftershocks that has persisted as a consequence/reward for finally viewing Welles’ first masterpiece, is that I have been thinking a lot more about the ways in which film moves me, and why. I have been trying to further understand myself, to comprehend the mechanisms by which I am most deeply touched and entertained by art; not to disprove or question them, but to embrace them, and to marvel. This may sounds like too romantic a viewpoint to take on such issues, and perhaps it is, but it suits the way I am right now.
Indeed, after watching a film the other night (What's Eating Gilbert Grape?), I got to thinking about the first time I was sure I was enamoured so completely with cinema and everything that came with it. Perhaps it was a subconscious rendering of my attempts to patch the distance between that time and now, to fix the wounds and the spaces left inside my head from disregarding it. Perhaps it’s just one of those things that occasionally slides into my mind when I’m content.
That first time, though…that moment has been preserved with rare and mythic clarity. It is an oddly pristine specimen in those dust-gathering museum halls behind my eyes. It happened during the last time I watched The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, about 3 years ago. Aside from the pratfall that leads into the last section of the film, that scene is not outwardly too comedic (although, admittedly, there are healthy doses of Leone’s mordant wit throughout), but I felt the laughter building in my body as I watched. The shot that begins that scene, leading from Eli Wallach’s clown-like tumble away from a cannonball’s impact, is, again, perfect. Indeed, whilst I wouldn’t wholly agree with Tarantino’s assertion that the film is the best directed in history (in fact, I’d suggest that Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West is more consistent…), I do not think I have seen anything more astounding on any screen, small or big, that fully compares with the wonder of that shot, the way the camera spins and tracks Wallach through the avenues of that dusty graveyard with a manic, poetic intensity matched only by Ennio Morricone’s accompanying score. It encapsulates the view that the true fullness of life is to be found in the quests and journeys that we take on our way through it, and, dizzying as some may find it, that shot is a joy to me. That everything preceding it is nearly as good and most things that follow are better is testament to the genius of the work and those who made it. I have seen Brando toying with the shadows in Apocalypse Now, Walken playing with a revolver in The Deer Hunter, and De Niro throwing punches at the air in the flawless black and white of Raging Bull, and yet I still don’t think I’ve seen anything to quite match the way that seemed to me that day.
But, even if nothing ever beats that moment when I first started falling, I know this feeling is going to last, because, as I said, I’m laughing and smiling at films more than ever of late. I recently caught Up in the Air, and, for a good half hour section of that film, couldn’t contain my grin. Last weekend, I watched Bertolucci’s The Conformist, and a simple camera movement nearly made me laugh and cry at once, just because of the colours and the sly curve of the line along which the lens shifted. Everything that follows the conversation that forms the centrepiece of Godard’s Breathless felt like the lead-up to a gut-punch, even as it drew a smile across my face.
And that’s what this love of film is to me. It is topsy-turvy and upside down and direct and straight-shooting. I laugh sometimes at lines that are more touching than funny, and I cannot stop weeping as I watch certain scenes in certain films - whether it is with joy or distress doesn’t matter so much some nights, it only matters that the film has reached me, seen who and how I am, and shown me something glorious in return. The smiles and the tears and the laughter are simply my part of the conversation that these films and I hold in the dark, and some of this writing is what happens when the credits roll and I don’t want to stop talking back.
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